RE: How to easily defeat any argument for God
August 15, 2019 at 7:23 am
(This post was last modified: August 15, 2019 at 7:33 am by Acrobat.)
(August 14, 2019 at 9:23 am)LadyForCamus Wrote:(August 13, 2019 at 9:12 pm)Belaqua Wrote: I wonder if any of us can justify these things.
Why shouldn't we hurt people? Because it works against the wellbeing of them and our society.
Why is it bad to work against that wellbeing? Because we want wellbeing.
Why is it good to want wellbeing? Because we just want it.....
If these ethical principles ultimately come down to habit, or preferences, then they may just change.
I dunno, Bel. I don’t think it’s ever going change that most beings want to be. It’s kind of that thing unique to us, lol. As long as that fact remains true, “goods” and “bads” with reference to well-being, can be objective. I mean, what are we even talking about if we aren’t talking about well-being? What does “morally good” or “morally bad” even mean outside of the context of living beings? Acro refuses to consider these facts, and as a result he’s left with the only other explanation available to him regarding ‘what is good’:
“It just is.”
Who decides that it “is”? A god? How can we know what a god thinks is good? Does he have to justify his morality with reference to well-being, or do we just do as told; no questions asked? That’s not a superior alternative to moral realism, lol. Further, if we don’t have to justify our morality using any facts about reality, it’s far more susceptible to whim and preference. “I just know”, and “it just is”, can be used by anyone in defense of literally anything. How reliable is a method that can lead to mutually exclusive conclusions?
I'm not offering an alternative to moral realism, a non-natural moralist whether you're an atheist or not, could just as well acknowledge what I am getting it. What I am rejecting is natural realism.
We recognize that Good is something objective, something that exists outside of our minds. What I am rejecting is the naturalist suggestion that Good exists somewhere within the scientific and historical facts (natural facts) of reality. But it doesn't. It objectiveness, it existence is in some non-natural reality. We see the color, the light it cast on things like "increasing well being". But it's not increasing well being in and of itself.
I'll try and demonstrate this with G.E. Moore's (an atheist non-natural realist) Open Question Arguement:
X= Increasing Wellbeing.
Quote:Premise 1: If X is (analytically equivalent to) good, then the question "Is it true that X is good?" is meaningless.
Premise 2: The question "Is it true that X is good?" is not meaningless (i.e. it is an open question).
Conclusion: X is not (analytically equivalent to) good.
"The type of question Moore refers to in this argument is an identity question, "Is it true that X is Y?" Such a question is an open question if a conceptually competent speaker can question this; otherwise the question is closed. For example, "I know he is a vegan, but does he eat meat?" would be a closed question. However, "I know that it is pleasurable, but is it good?" is an open question; the question cannot be deduced from the conceptual terms alone.
The open-question argument claims that any attempt to identify morality with some set of observable, natural properties will always be an open question (unlike, say, a horse, which can be defined in terms of observable properties). Moore further argued that if this is true, then moral facts cannot be reduced to natural properties and that therefore ethical naturalism is false. Put another way, what Moore is saying is that any attempt to define good in terms of a naturalistic property fails because all definitions can be transformed into closed questions (the subject and predicate being conceptually identical; it is given in language itself that the two terms mean the same thing); however, all purported naturalistic definitions of good are transformable into open questions. It is still controversial whether good is the same thing as pleasure, etc. Shortly before (in section §11), Moore said if good is defined as pleasure (or any other naturalistic property) "good" may be substituted for "pleasure" anywhere it occurs. However, "pleasure is good" is a meaningful, informative statement; but "good is good" (after making the substitution) is an empty, non-informative tautology."
Good as indefinable[edit]
Moore contended that goodness cannot be analysed in terms of any other property. In Principia Ethica, he writes:
It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not "other," but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness.
Therefore, we cannot define "good" by explaining it in other words. We can only point to an action or a thing and say "That is good." Similarly, we cannot describe to a person born totally blind exactly what yellow is. We can only show a sighted person a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say "That is yellow."
Good as a non-natural property"
In addition to categorising "good" as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property. This means that it cannot be empirically or scientifically tested or verified - it is not within the bounds of "natural science"."
-Wikipedia.